Issue

OnPaperII BodzianovskiNicht Berühren Bitte

ARTISTS:

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

The second part of On Paper, A Prior's contribution to the 5th Berlin Biennial, consists of six separate publications and limited editions conceived by Ahmet Öğüt , Kristina Norman, Manon de Boer, Susanne Kriemann, Cezary Bodzianowski and Paulina Olowska. Each of these editions forms a unique ‘object’ that, as paper, is tied to the dematerialized realm of conceptual art, but that also cannot be thought of outside its object status. As such they may be the quintessential ‘things that cast no shadow’, thus sounding a tangible echo of certain works at the biennial.

In collaboration with the 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art, A Prior Magazine has developed a two-fold project entitled On Paper.
‘Zuhandenheit’ [ready-to-hand]—a Heideggerian term used to explore the meaning and functionality of objects in relation toman/human beings—is activated throughout On Paper by making readable objects available to the visitors of the biennale; and by creating a tangible echo of the biennale works on paper. This ‘Zuhandenheit’ is not only grounded in the form of the project, but also in the content of the first part of On Paper: A Prior #17 (David Maljkovic, Daniel Knorr, Kristina Norman).

Having begun his artistic training as a sculptor, pursuing studies in both his native Poland and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Cezary Bodzianowski has increasingly turned to the creation of the particular brand of actions for which he has since become known. Many of his simple but absurd gestures—such as camouflaging himself as foliage while standing beneath a tree or positioning himself, legs in the air, in the empty space below a staircase—happen in front of an unsuspecting audience of regular passersby. The exhibition visitor, then, will likely have missed precisely the direct experience of the work of art that they might expect to find when encountering his name in an artist’s list for an exhibition. In some cases, the artist orchestrates photo or filmic documentation to record the events that might have otherwise entirely escaped public attention. But, in other instances, Bodzianowski simply displaces the expected location or protocol of the artwork, as in Castle (2006), for which the artist read passages from Kafka’s eponymous novel to office workers in a Polish museum at spontaneously announced intervals (in that case, the action was accessible to whomever of the art audience that dared follow him up to the museum’s office spaces).

This artist's book was published by A Prior on the occasion of the 5th Berlin Biennial, with the support of Zero gallery, Milano